Republicans will regret taking the easy way out on George Santos

On Wednesday, the House voted to refer the expulsion of Rep George Santos (R - New York) to the House Ethics Committee, effectively tabling Democratic efforts to shelve Mr Santos.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has said this would be the proper course of action to ensure that Mr Santos, who last week was arrested on 13 charges. This came despite the fact that traditionally, the Ethics Committee defers to the Justice Department when it begins a criminal investigation of a member of Congress.

But our friends over at Punchbowl News reported that the House Ethics Committee told the Justice Department to pound sand. (It should be noted that the House Ethics Committee, unlike other committees, is comprised of an equal number of Democrats and metes out punishments and probes to both parties in equal measure).

The effort to expel Mr Santos was always going to be a heavy lift. For one, progressive members like Reps Robert Garcia (D - California), Daniel Goldman (D - New York) and Ritchie Torres (D - New York) led the effort. Teaming up with left-wing Democrats, especially when Republicans are in the majority and they forced the vote, does not appeal to many Republicans.

Second, Mr McCarthy’s speakership is perpetually on thin ice and he needs every vote to maintain his gavel, especially as he engages in tense negotiations with the White House on the debt limit. Many conservative Republicans will likely scoff at any final agreement Mr McCarthy makes with the Biden administration, so he will need every other Republican (and some Democrats) to pass a final debt limit deal.

But the very reasons that Mr McCarthy and House Republican leadership have refrained from punishing Mr Santos might be the same reasons they might come to regret not expelling him immediately.

Mr Santos’s New York 3rd district voted for Mr Biden in 2020. Republicans mostly swept congressional seats on Long Island last year on the back of a massive underperformance from Governor Kathy Hochul and concerns about escalating crime. Four of the 18 Biden district Republicans are located in New York. That puts a major target on all of their backs come 2024 and Democrats will desperately want to flip them as they seek to win back the House of Representatives, since they would only need to flip five more seats to win back the majority in 2024.

Mr McCarthy knows that were Mr Santos to resign now, that would trigger a special election that would likely hand the seat over to a Democrat in a time when he cannot afford to lose a single member. At the same time, many of the Republicans in New York have delivered the most forceful calls for Mr Santos to resign.

“I believe this individual is a stain on the institution, a stain on the state of New York and a stain on Long Island and a stain on the beloved Nassau County,” fellow Rep Anthony D’Esposito (R - New York), one of the freshman Republicans who flipped a Long Island seat, said in a floor speech. Mr D’Esposito knows that if he does not create distance between himself and Mr Santos, he risks losing his seat come 2024.

At the same time, he voted to refer Mr Santos’s expulsion to the Ethics Committee, saying “I am in the understanding that we do not have the two-thirds support from members of this House to expel that individual.”

But this is too clever by half. Most voters will not see this as letting the process play out but rather delaying the inevitable. And it will ultimately be a bridge too far.